If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You will be required to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

See right now ( I tried my best - lol ), to hot link my media from RIDGID Connect. I tried using image sources from the CP and from the browser side with no luck. Now that is really good news because it does show me that RIDGID has nothing but the 100% awesome security in mind BUT I still am PAYING photobucket and godaddy a monthly fee, can you see where I am going with this?

Its kinda a "win win" for both parties to allow "permission based" linking of images, let me explain.

See if you DON'T thats okay. I will still love RIDGID connect anyway, hey that rhythms. Anyway, I will still have to pay godaddy and photobucket to host images related to my trade ( BOO!) I personally rather be able to use the source if my already uploaded images.

Either way, I need someone to host images because that will make my website faster. Now being that RIDGID builds reputations and all I though thy might be interested in "expanding" a bit more in today;s digital world.

Now sure, You still can not let people hot link from the job page or the admin control panel thats fine, and the account DEFAULT should not allow hotlinking at all,

But how about a spot where you could "allow" websites like a general url like how like recaptcha gives you a url and then sets a key.

So basically you could go to the control panal and allow "plumbingskool.com" to have access to hotlink, but all others who tried to would get a 404 or if you wanted to be slick you could add a redirect with a frame break pushing the not allowed hot linkers to the homepage, but thats to dirty so just hiding the source the way you are now would be fine.

Google adsense has a feature like this for adsense its called "allowed sites"

What do you think?

I would also pay extra for this as well, knowing that pulling my images from your servers does increase bandwith , but at the same time many website owners big and small need a reliable CMS image hosting site to speed up there own site.

In fact both yahoo and google speed tools suggest using a media network,

I am really interested in a few other people's thoughts here. You touched on why this isn't really possible today, which is security. We build RIDGIDConnect with security in mind expecting most media to only ever really be shared with a few individuals. With this in mind, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) does not make a lot of sense. Essentially what those do is place the same piece of media on a handful of geographically dispersed servers. This ensures a low latency link between a user and the file they are downloading. We do use a CDN for the video on the homepage because of the volume that gets compared to any of the other sites.

Without getting too technical (because I will get lost myself trying), I will tell you that we can certainly offer what you are looking for. We designed the storage architecture to be able to leverage our own infrastructure, a CDN or another offering like FTP. Really, if a file can be moved there via code, then we could theoretically point RIDGIDConnect to store files there. HOWEVER, there are trade offs in doing this that we would need to work past. We route videos on the site through a media server that streams them to users. This is done for security reasons, but more importantly to give direct access to points in a video that might be bookmarked. So if you have a 20 minute inspection and the root blockage is 18 minutes in, you can go directly to that point without downloading the first 18 minutes. We also allow you to just take a snapshot of that issue and show it to your customer so they dont need to watch the video, but I digress! Anyways, if we move this out to a CDN, then we lose that basic ability. There are other higher end offerings within some CDNs that will allow advanced things like this, but they come at a cost that we cant quite justify yet. Feedback like this could help.

When I read this, I think CDNs are one piece of this, but the real issue is just having access to things you store here for purposes other than a job report. Would this be the exception to most of your media? Would you expect that only 5% or so of what you store would need to be able to be displayed outside of the site? Would you only be showing it via your own websites, or would these be getting linked from a facebook, myspace or other 3rd party site? Would it make sense that you control this one piece of media at time? For example, you would set a permission on a picture that it is "Available for Public Download" and doing that would give you a URL like http://www.ridgidconnect.com/public/...6SKYNJU986.jpg that you could then paste wherever you wanted?

Let me know if this sounds right. I would be interested in some other ideas related to this and we can come up with more of an offering to make it possible. The only reason it isn't there yet is that we didn't know anyone wanted it

If you added the feature "hotlinking allowed" which would let me use the media that was uploaded to RIDGIDConnect YOU(RIDGID) would essentially be "my" content delivery network, creating "my" website to be faster.

Well, if the "target" is set to be a download then no, that would suck, It would need to be like photobucket with a url that would allow the image to be diaplayed on another website , called "hot-linking" ~ silly ;-)

Let me know if this sounds right. I would be interested in some other ideas related to this and we can come up with more of an offering to make it possible. The only reason it isn't there yet is that we didn't know anyone wanted it

Yes, so ya, I think what I am saying that an option to be able to have free rain of your accounts media would be cooler.

I just feel "restricted" the ways its set up at the moment, (can't direct link)

Okay, Thats just my opinions, no biggie if you disagree ;-)

Comment

I think the answer is certainly yes. This is something we are capable of, but it would be a change to how we have things today and require some careful planning. What I would be cautious of is inadvertently along the way making it too easy for customer to screw up and leave there media not secured. After all, I was caught on tape saying we designed RIDGIDConnect with security in mind from the beginning .

I will bat the idea around with some of the guys tomorrow on how we think this would be best done and the level of work needed to do it. One of us might approach you for more feedback on this topic soon. As you can imagine we have a full plate of enhancements in the works, so this is up against some stiff competition, but it is now on our list of to do's.

Comment

Well, if the "target" is set to be a download then no, that would suck, It would need to be like photobucket with a url that would allow the image to be diaplayed on another website , called "hot-linking" ~ silly ;-)

I think I understood most of what you are saying except this part. The "target" is always going to be a URL for it to be downloaded because that is all any browser knows to do. Maybe I wasn't clear in how I was saying it or the automatic linking made it unclear. What I was describing is just what Photobucket does, and I just said it differently. You would identify a piece of media that you want to share on the site, and we would give you an easy to share permanent direct link to it that any site could reference.